On June 23, Alphabet (GOOGL) fell 3.19% in pre-market trading to $341.24/share, with turnover of approximately $56.35 million, extending selling pressure after the stock suffered its worst single-day decline in over a year during the prior session.
The continued weakness stems from the departure of two senior AI leaders within three days. Noam Shazeer, co-author of the foundational Transformer architecture paper and co-lead of the Gemini model, announced he would join OpenAI. Just two days later, John Jumper, the AlphaFold lead who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, declared his move to Anthropic. With these exits, all eight original Transformer paper authors have now left Google, and AlphaFold has lost its core architect.
Notably, Google had spent $2.7 billion acquiring Character.AI in 2024 partly to bring Shazeer back, making his departure after less than two years particularly damaging to investor confidence. Broader concerns over AI capital expenditure returns and a decline in SpaceX-related holdings further compounded the sell-off, which erased approximately $225 billion in market capitalization during the prior regular session.
(The above content is based on publicly available market information, generated by a program or algorithm, and is intended solely as a stock movement alert. It does not constitute investment advice or a basis for trading decisions.)
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